Àgbà Akin is raising a generational talent of techies by tutoring young Nigerians programming for free on social media, using his Twitter, where he has more followers.
Born Akinola Abdulakeem Akinade, the 24-year-old software engineer and tech expert who began his journey into the tech space by learning web designing has grown into building a global team of experts devoted to helping clients transform App concepts into business reality at Ssu-Technology Limited.
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Àgbà Akin has continued to empower market professionals with a range of multinational mobile software companies and local businesses after launching Swiftspeed Appcreator, a cross-platform and open-source mobile app maker developed and managed by his company “Ssu-Technology Limited”.
Swiftspeed Appcreator boasts of more than 50,000 active users and over 150,000 apps have been created using the software. In this interview, Àgbà Akin speaks on his mission to make positive changes in the tech ecosystem, future of his new incorporation and what he’s bringing to Africa.
Tell us about your journey into technology space.
My journey was quite a rough one, but I have a mother who gave everything she could to support me. My father wanted me to learn furniture; how funny, I wasn’t interested, so I moved away from home to live with my aunt who put me in a computer shop. We used to have this person at that computer shop who have a great understanding of web design, so I always watch him closely whenever he’s working with shop computer to create amazing web designs. So one day, he brought me closer and started teaching me too, the interest became a passion and I started craving to learn even more.
When I got admitted into the university, my mother supported me financially with lots of funds to enroll for programming courses on Udacity, then I got Andela scholarship in App development.
Upon finishing these courses, I started taking jobs from my friends who need to build websites and basically do a design for free and all, then I started getting clients who pay for my services in-house and on freelance platform like Upwork. Then I was earning for a bit. I opened a WordPress blog to write about technology and mostly Google products, where I also earned extra income from Google AdSense.
Then collating all this money, it started looking like what we’d consider a bit too much for an 18-year-old, my parent were worried, they wanted to make sure it wasn’t fraud and my mother personally came to my school which was University of Ilorin to interview some of my friend. She also spoke with my then-roommate and when she confirmed everything was fine. She advised me to start up my own company. A new story on its own.
How old were you when you made your first significant break through in tech, and what exactly made you so much money?
I was 18, I remember working on this App for Joint Admission and Matriculation Board “Jamb” for Nigerian students to practice past question. The App got over 100,000 download within 6 months of its release. It made me a lot of money at the time and was one of my first project I got money from since after graduating from learning to code.
So you studied Agriculture but ended up in a tech space, do you have a plan for an engineering career?
Oh, engineering career, educationally, I think not, but I’m popularly referred to as senior software engineer amongst my colleague and fellow techies, so I think I’m probably already an engineer, May be not academically 😉. But another degree in Engineering is not feasible. I’ll rather MBA and Ph.D. in business-related fields. The tech skill is already mostly acquired through self taught, I’m all up on exploring the entrepreneurial part of the industry now.
What do you do at your company, Ssu-Tech Limited?
Actually, I’m the CEO, and I have a team of 7 other nerds who bought and are fully committed to my vision to revolutionize the Nigeria tech space. Basically what I do is supervision, and I am very good at this given my experience and familiarity with tech, I can bring value to all departments we have from, content creation, to development team, to product team, to support team, and even sales. Given my experience, I give a directional instruction and collaborate to improve our work and existing product.
You launched a software “Swiftspeed Appcreator”, what is your aim ?
Thank you. When I started out my company (Swiftspeed) we didn’t have any product, we just contract with clients to build websites and Apps with them, but for a start-up to actualize its full potential, you need to keep yourself and the team busy all the time and build a constant source of revenue. I thought, “what if we don’t have a client for a particular month? How would we sustain the salary payment flow and record an income for the company ?” So we thought to create a product, which was Swiftspeed Appcreator. It is a cross-platform mobile application development platform. No knowledge of coding is required to use this software, and it’s inspired to help businesses get to market on time with a sophisticated mobile app solution, easy to build, easy to manage, and very affordable to sustain instead of using random individual developer.
How is the response so far?
The response has been massive, our mobile application was launched in 2019 and has almost 200k installs in Google Play so far. We also have more than 50,000 active users and over 150,000 apps have been created using the software. There’s a lot of publication about the product, and the review on Trustpilot shows it’s miles ahead of competitors. For an African-centred product, we are doing perfectly fine.
Can you remember the first major project you handled?
The first project I handled was to help my friend build an e-commerce website for his school project where he intended to sell his products.
How is the journey so far, what are your good and bad stories?
The journey has been beautiful, of course, every life journey comes with up and down, but I’ve always used the down part of my story as a motivation to do better, learn to from my mistakes, associate and surround myself with a team of people who can help me see a solution where I am not even thinking of one at all.
You are running programming tutorials on Twitter, how convenient is that?
It’s not so convenient, I didn’t even know it was going to be possible given the platform was twitter and you can’t type more than just 280character, but it’s a passion for me, I see the way Nigeria youth community is perceived as a place filled with fraudsters, and I thought about the best way to help the youths best and help find their feet by teaching them various things about tech, and I’ve chosen to use Twitter, which is my most active social media
I created a full web development course in html, css & JavaScript and it’s there for all to access using this link here.
The turnout has been massive, I had over 70k followers in just 2 weeks of starting out. Thousands of people enrolled in the course, and they are constantly practicing with a picture of their workspace. It makes me happy that I’m bringing up a generational talent of techies very soon.
Are there criteria for joining?
Criteria for joining is just as simple as following up with the classes and doing all the class tests assigned. We intend to host exams and offer scholarships as well via our newly UK Incorporated product, aptLearn(aptLearn.io) by offering scholarships to students who are outstanding in my Twitter classes to study programming and other tech-related courses.
How would you rate IT in Nigeria?
I think IT, for now, is still underdeveloped, but there’s been some kind of revolutions happening in the tech spaces of late with big startups bagging seed and other prominent series funding and taking their products to the next level both local and global stages. If any other thing is not advancing and progressive in the country at the moment, I am sure tech is.
We have a lot to do in terms of bridging the technology divides, but can you as an expert probably foresee the possible timeline when we can actually bridge this?
The technology divides in Nigeria is staggering, I get a lot of hate and abuse for doing what I’m doing, generally, it’s not uncommon on Twitter for people to be rather insulting than welcoming, however I don’t let that get to me because teaching people how to code for free means we will be inducting a lot of generational tech talent in a few months and already existing people in the community are feeling threatened, but another developer success does and can never impact your own success “Danny Thompson, 2021”.
I feel through proper dialogue, unlearning, relearning, and re-education, we can make the people who are short of knowledgeable about the purpose of bridging the gap and divides understand that the tech community is big enough for everyone to thrive irrespective of niche or dealings.
What are you passionate about, that you are already working on or plan to do soon?
I am passionate about impacting knowledge and making positive changes to the tech ecosystem, and I’ve been able to do that with over 70 thousands of Nigerian youths who take my tech classes using Twitter threads. This turnout gives me the drive to continue to want to give back to the community and diversify my content. I think I’ll like to call myself a creator now, because of the constant way of engagement on my classes with Twitter thread. This particular one has over 2M+ impressions so far.
Sometimes when I have to convey more important messages, especially making use of live IDE, I use my website akinolaakeem.com as well to buttress the point of my content to make the information I’m trying to pass across on a particular topic to be well understood.
What I’m working on will be how teaching people how to code as shaped up another product idea of creating a learning platform that provides the needed tools and courses for people to learn, let’s just call it the Udemy of Africa. We’ve recently start up the company (aptLearn Ltd) and headquartered at 85, Great Portland Street, London, United Kingdom. My press release ( https://aptlearn.io/press-release-aptlearn-now-in-uk/ ) provides more insight on our mission to transform and revolutionize the tech spaces in Africa .
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